The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination is the oldest UN human rights treaty, and for over forty years, the Committee overseeing its implementation, CERD, has had the power to decide individual communications. Despite this long history, a settled evidentiary framework has not materialised yet. The Committee rarely discussed evidence, and when it did, the results could differ markedly: In Dawas and Shava v. Denmark (2012), a case on mob violence, the Committee did not directly engage with the evidence, which led to a resurfacing of evidentiary questions during the follow-up phase, when they could no longer be addressed. Far preferable is the approach adopted in Zapescu v. Moldova (2021), dealing with discriminatory employment practices, where the Committee discussed the standard of proof for procedural violations and the necessary evidence. More elaborations of this kind are needed for a clear evidentiary pathway to emerge.

This introductory chapter illustrates why evidence in the individual communications procedure of the United Nations human rights treaty bodies (UNTB) is an issue requiring reflection and clarification. The chapter firstly contextualises this central topic of this book by broadly introducing the UNTBs’ mandates, composition and ways of working, as well as some general features of their individual communications procedures. Indications are given of how this legal, institutional and procedural setting interacts with the handling of evidence by the UNTBs, as well as some of the key questions it raises. The chapter further outlines some of the particular research challenges encountered in tackling the questions at the heart of this book, and how they have been addressed. It then goes on to introduce the four-part structure of the book and its ten chapters, including the final chapter, containing recommendations. Finally, this introduction discusses cross-cutting themes which emerge from the contributions.

This chapter reviews the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention’s (WGAD) approach to issues of evidence and burdens of proof. It aims to provide a useful point of comparison with the UNTBs’ evidentiary procedures. The WGAD has developed an increasingly sophisticated approach to evidence, providing strong incentives for other decision-making bodies to take up its conclusions and procedures. In this chapter, the following arguments are substantiated: first, that the Working Group’s increasingly formalised and standardised approach to evidence reflects the maturing of the Working Group and its entrenchment in the ecosystem of human rights bodies; second, that its nuanced evidentiary approach can serve to enhance its credibility with states and claimants, in order to increase compliance rates; and third, its detailed approaches to evidentiary standards and challenges could provide precedents for UNTBs with individual claims mandates to follow a similar approach.

The concept of ‘stereotypes’ refers to generalisations that are made about the behaviour adopted and/or the characteristics possessed by the members of a particular group. Involving presumptions about human actions and attributes, a stereotype provides ready-made narratives as to how and why some events unfold as they do. Thus, stereotypes, especially when they operate ‘undetected’, hamper an objective analysis of the factual situation. In the courtroom, they tend to have a polluting effect on the assessment of evidence, leading to relevant pieces of evidence being ignored, irrelevant circumstances being given weight, and higher standards of proof being imposed than would have been the case in their absence. This chapter focuses on the approach of the CEDAW Committee in examining the impact of gender stereotypes on the evaluation of evidence performed by domestic courts. It provides an in-depth analysis of the views adopted by the Committee in selected individual communications.

Human rights violations often form part of a pattern or practice of violations, rather than being purely isolated incidents. This context is not consistently taken into account by UNTBs during individual case consideration, however. This chapter explores several ways in which awareness of human rights violations’ embeddedness in wider contexts of violations should inform UNTB practice. In particular, the chapter considers the impact, or potential impact, of patterns and practices of violations on the manner in which UNTBs receive information, and the sorts of sources they recognize in their decisions; on UNTBs approaches to the exhaustion of domestic remedies and the burden of proof; on case structuring; and on findings, recommendations and follow-up procedures. The chapter ends by observing that UNTBs are not only receivers but also key disseminators of information, and suggests ways in which their findings as to the patterns and practices of violations may be more effectively disseminated.

This chapter addresses evidence-related recommendations for the consideration of the UN treaty bodies. Written by three practitioners from the civil society sector, with direct experience of the individual communication procedure before the UNTBs, it also benefited from input from all the contributors to the volume, which it concludes. Part I offers normative reflections. It deals with legal questions, including: What should the applicable standard be when determining human rights claims? How should this standard vary according to the type of claim and the stage of the proceedings? In what circumstances and under which conditions should the burden of proof be shifted from the complainant to the respondent state? Part II deals with organisational, and thus more mundane issues, but it highlights how proper identification and communication of the applicable evidentiary concepts and norms are essential to a transparent, accessible and fair system, therefore necessitating proper resourcing.

This chapter examines what is considered a fact in individual communications processed by the Human Rights Committee (HRC), recognized as the UN’s most authoritative human rights monitoring body. Despite its significance, little is known about the HRC’s handling of individual complaints against states that have signed the optional protocol. Through the case studies of Sanila-Aikio v. Finland (2018) and Näkkäläjärvi et al. v. Finland (2018), which address the inclusion of new voters on the Sámi Parliament’s electoral roll, the chapter scrutinizes the Committee’s evidentiary practices. Notably, the Finnish Supreme Administrative Court added ninety-three persons to the Sámi Parliament’s electoral roll, while an unreferenced study suggested over half a million could be eligible. The Committee included this study without verifying its reliability. The chapter explores how evidence is translated and distanced from Committee members, questioning how material veracity is determined. It concludes by reflecting on how the HRC’s evidentiary regime shapes and supports certain narratives while marginalizing others.

This chapter focuses on the expressive functions of tears, the face and the body on the early modern stage, to probe the deep relation between drama and the law, including their entwined but distinct investments in natural self-evidence and the rhetoric of presence. Through an interdiscursive approach, it shows how drama mines the complexities of hypokrisis through an engagement with the radical performativity at the core of law, and offers the provocation that law’s disknowledges are turned into a poetic condition of theatrical knowledge, and a forging of subjecthood and inwardness that complicates the distinction between the fiction of theatre and the reality of the law court. It ends with the suggestion that the theatre looks at, as well as beyond, the vivid invisibilities of judicial encounters to unpack the epistemic, affective and ethical impulses structuring the ‘scene’ of law.

Assembling and evaluating warrant for your claims involves giving reasons why these claims might be true or false. Such reasons may be understood as consisting of conjunctions of factual and relevance claims which may be adduced in favour of the claims in question. These claims themselves may in turn be warranted by further such conjunctions, and so on through indefinite higher ‘levels’ of evidence. We show how to structure relevant claims into an evidence role-map. We set out how to apply this to indirect local evidence, referencing a situation-specific causal equation model of each causal step. By reference to our pluralistic account of causation, we identify eight categories of evidence for each step. We introduce a notation for this approach and illustrate it using the Barbados sugar-sweetened beverage tax example, describing its use in post-hoc evaluation and ex ante prediction.

We offer evidence-role maps detailing the relations between available data and the claims made by the theory of change we have developed for the L pathway. Using these maps, we then evaluate warrant for the causal claim made by each of the steps in the L pathway, establishing what we take to be a strong warrant for each of them and hence our overall account of this pathway and the singular causal claim that the introduction of collaborative case audits contributed to Signs of Safety implementation in M. In doing so, we illustrate our method for establishing warrant for such causal claims.

Warrant for singular causal claims can be ‘local’, comprising claims about features and happenings in the setting the claim concerns, or ‘from afar’, comprising claims about other settings. It may also be ‘direct’, concerning whether the claim itself is true, or indirect concerning facts that bear upon whether the claim is true. Evidence claims warranting claims of all these sorts should be understood as composed of conjunctions of factual claims and relevance claims. Such claims may be compiled into ‘evidence trees’ in which each claim is warranted (as practical and required) with further conjunctions of claims at higher ‘levels’ of evidence. This may be represented diagrammatically and serves to structure the evidence to show the roles which each piece of evidence plays, and the relation between these roles. Our primary focus is on indirect local warrant.

As a further example of our approach, we offer a detailed post-hoc case study of the implementation of the Signs of Safety practice approach in child protection. This is chosen because it has been deployed in multiple places but evidence suggests it is often only partially implemented. Our case study is of a child protection agency M which evidence shows achieved a high standard of implementation. In this case study we had a rich evidence base to work with, both of background research on child protection implementations able to provide evidence from afar of systemic factors that might be causally important and of local evidence available from extensive contemporaneous documentation in M. Our method helps to illustrate and explain the range of changes needed to support Signs of Safety as the organisational practice approach in M.

Different sorts of evidence for a singular causal claim impact its overall warrant in different ways. We show how to assemble the evidence we have identified to provide an overall assessment of its strength of support/warrant for claims at issue, giving a rough guide to the significance of particular kinds of evidence within our schema and the identification of gaps in the evidence. This cannot be too formal a process (you shouldn’t pretend to more precision than is available) but we suggest the use of arguments to make sense of relations between pieces of evidence and causal claims, as per Fuller et al., and proper application of the ‘weakest link’ principle. We offer a catalogue of nodes to incorporate into such arguments based on our evidence categories.

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Baha’i religious minority in Iran has been persecuted by the Iranian government, with varying degrees of intensity. In 2011, former UNAMIR Commander Romeo Dallaire recognised their vulnerability in a speech to the Canadian Senate. ‘The similarities with what I saw in Rwanda are absolutely unquestionable’, he opined, ‘we know the genocidal intent of the Iranian state.’ This chapter will examine the plight of the Baha’i between the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and 2024. During this period, the Baha'i community has experienced ongoing and at times severe risk of genocide. Yet various factors have contributed to preventing the ongoing vulnerability from escalating. This chapter examines persecution of the Iranian Baha’i minority, and the domestic and international response. It examines the interplay of risk and resilience factors that have shaped their experience. The chapter concludes by reflecting on what can be learned about resilience from this case study of the presence of long-term risk.

Anti-Haitian sentiment is so entrenched in the Dominican Republic that it has its own name: antihaitianismo. The long history of discrimination and persecution of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent includes a massacre in 1937, which claimed around 18,000 lives. While such large-scale violence has not been repeated, Haitians and Haitian–Dominicans have experienced ongoing discrimination and human rights violations. Since the 1990s, there have been repeated mass deportations into Haiti, and in the 2010s, over 100,000 Haitian–Dominicans were stripped of their citizenship, rendering them stateless. By the early 2000s, many recognised the presence of risk factors for genocide in the Dominican Republic. Yet despite the risk, such violence did not occur. Moreover, since then multiple risk assessment models have documented decreasing risk. This chapter explores this constructive trajectory. It considers the risk factors and the factors that have promoted resilience over the period in question. Understanding how and why the violence of 1937 has not been repeated, and the gradual amelioration of risk in the Dominican Republic, can help us identify key factors that promote resilience to genocide.

When Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940, Danish opposition to the persecution of its Jewish minority was clear from the outset. As the occupation progressed, many individuals and groups vied for influence on this issue, including the King, the church, public figures, German officials in Denmark and the Danish Nazi party. The uneasy cooperation between Denmark and Germany held until August 1943, before collapsing in acrimony. The Nazis then sought to take advantage of the crisis to deport the Jews. The Danish people, however, mounted an extraordinary resistance to thwart their plans. The chapter examines the daring rescue of the Jews and the creation of a safe passage to Sweden. It also explores the fate of those who were captured and deported to Theresienstadt; and those children who stayed behind in hiding in Denmark. The next section of the chapter seeks to understand these exceptional experiences. It considers what made the rescue of Danish Jewry possible, and what were the leading factors that contributed to this outcome. Finally, the chapter concludes by considering how this case study can contribute to our understanding of what promotes resilience to genocide.

By early September in 1999, many feared genocide in East Timor was imminent. Following a UN-sanctioned referendum, in which the East Timorese people voted in favour of independence rather than autonomy within Indonesia, violence had exploded in the province. Militias, intimately linked with the Indonesian armed forces, were perpetrating massacres, destroying infrastructure and forcibly displacing tens of thousands of East Timorese. Jailed independence leader Xanana Gusmao warned: ‘We foresee chaos. We foresee … genocide in East Timor’, a view shared by many experts on the region. Yet these dire predictions did not come to pass. Australia declared its willingness to lead an international peacekeeping force and, under overwhelming international pressure, Indonesia acquiesced to the intervention. Within days of UN-authorisation, the first troops of INTERFET arrived in Dili, and the risk of genocide very quickly abated. This chapter examines the factors that led up to this crucial intervention and enabled a timely and robust international response to the crisis. It concludes by considering how lessons from this example can inform an evidence-based approach to genocide prevention.

There is no doubt that the Bulgarian Jewish population was at extreme risk of genocide during the Holocaust. At one stage, the cattle cars were literally waiting at the station to begin deportations. Bulgaria, a Nazi ally, introduced discriminatory laws targeting its 48,000 or so Jewish citizens, who experienced escalating persecution. Jews in Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Macedonia were denied Bulgarian citizenship and deported to the death camps in early 1943. At the same time, the Bulgarian government approved a secret plan to commence deporting Bulgarian Jewry. Yet through an extraordinary series of events, political and public opposition forced the planned deportations to be repeatedly postponed, and ultimately abandoned. In this way, almost the entirety of the Bulgarian Jewish population survived the Holocaust. This chapter examines the key factors that led to their survival. It considers the role of the government, politicians, the church and ordinary Bulgarian citizens in contributing to this outcome. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the insights for genocide prevention that can be gleaned from this case study.

There is a strong need for evidence-based approaches to inform the growing field of genocide prevention. The chapter introduces conceptual and methodological advances to aid research in this area. It highlights the value of a ‘Risk and Resilience Framework’, which gives equal credence to the role of risk factors and factors promoting resilience, in understanding vulnerability to genocide. The chapter then introduces the six case studies that make up the bulk of the book – case studies in which a demonstrable risk of genocide was not realised in the period under study. Following this, it presents the key findings of the volume. These comprise eleven cross-situational factors that have contributed to promoting resilience to genocide in the past, and therefore have proven potential to do so in the future. The functioning and influence of each factor is described, followed by a brief analysis of its efficacy as identified in the case studies. The introduction concludes with a section exploring how these factors can be operationalised to stabilise and reduce vulnerability to genocide in current at-risk societies.

There is a long history of persecution of the Yazidi minority in Iraq. Following the rise of ISIS in the early 2010s, however, their status as non-Muslims rendered them particularly vulnerable. According to ISIS’ interpretation of Islamic law, Yazidis were infidels. Men who refused to convert were to be killed, and women enslaved. Therefore, when ISIS launched a surprise attack on Sinjar, a region heavily populated by Yazidis, all those who could immediately fled. Tens of thousands of Yazidis became stranded and besieged on Mt Sinjar, in extremely hazardous conditions. At imminent risk of genocide, they desperately sought assistance. Within days, a multifaceted international response enabled the vast majority of them to survive and escape. A key focus of the chapter is the nature of that response. It considers what led to the provision of emergency humanitarian aid, to the US military strikes that prevented further ISIS attack, and to the opening of a route to safety. Through careful examination of these critical events, it identifies the factors that mitigated genocide. The chapter concludes by reflecting on what lessons can be learned from this case study of resilience.